Advertisement

Silicon Valley isn't interested in your money - it's after your time. "Fifty white guys in California working in three tech companies have their hands on a billion people's attention," says Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google and co-founder of the Time Well Spent movement.

He's establishing a new school of app, website and device design that wants to give you far greater control over the role that technology has in your life.

Harris, 32, studied at Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, where Silicon Valley hopefuls - including the co-founders of Instagram - learned to apply the science of social persuasion to software design.

"The way that everyone ended up using the techniques - and how they often get used in software - is to convert people to sign-up pages and bring people back to visiting websites," he says.

Advertisement

Six tips for reclaiming your life from the clutches of technology

+5

+4

+3

Now he's crusading against endless notifications, infinitely scrolling news feeds and other design elements that hijack our attention. "Something like a smartphone becomes a basic extension of people's minds and bodies," he says, but the same devices "are basically designed by rooms full of hundreds of really smart statisticians, data scientists and engineers whose job is to find new ways to hijack people's attention."

Changing this might mean turning a tech world obsessed with efficiency and simplicity on its head. "We need technologists to be philosopher kings," Harris says. The moral values of technologists are expressed in the products they create - whether that's an app or an AI bot.

"Artificial intelligence is only as good as the quality of the thinking we give it to make that choice," he says.